The Nose
an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, directed by William Kentridge

William Kentridge: Five Themes an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, February 24–May 17, 2010; the Jeu de Paume, Paris, July 5–September 26, 2010; the Albertina, Vienna, October 30, 2010–January 30, 2011; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, March 5–May 29, 2011; and the S

Cymbeline of Music, June 3-6, and at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., June 23-July 5, 1998
a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Adrian Noble. performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Tramway Theater, Glasgow, February 4-7; the Palais Résidence, Brussels, February 12-15; and the Cultural Center Belem, Lisbon, February 19-23
a play directed by Jonathan Miller. At the Almeida Theatre, London, through February 1, 1997; then the

Winslow Homer October 15, 1995-January , 1996 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 21-May 26 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 20-September 2.
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,, Catalog of the exhibition by Nikolai Cikovsky Jr., by Franklin Kelly

The career of Christopher Marlowe’s world-conquering Tamburlaine, performed by John Douglas Thompson at Theatre for a New Audience, progresses like a river in flood, rising steadily and irresistibly and spilling over into actions of spectacular destruction, sparing nothing that stands in opposition.

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is a film with the courage of its silences and ellipses. Most easily categorized as a species of science fiction, it deftly evades verbal explanation and explicit continuity.

David O. Russell’s American Hustle slides with such grace through its intrigues, slipping in so many diverting props and devices and walk-ons that you may start to feel you’re being hustled by the film itself.

In The New York City Opera production of Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, the Duchess of Argyll’s horribleness has more to do with her insatiable vanity and assumption of aristocratic privilege, her mental imprisonment in a bubble world in which “the only people who were ever good to me were paid for it”: a tragic fate that unfolds within a brutally farcical sex comedy.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a work of sufficient richness to instantly invite repeat viewings. It is a history film that dares to pile on verbal and visual details thickly and rapidly enough that a second viewing may be necessary simply to register all that is going on.

Lancaster Dodd—the character played with such mesmerizing assurance by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master—is not to be confused with L. Ron Hubbard. That much should be said at the outset, given that the Scientology connection has served as a convenient tag for what Anderson’s new film is about. The notion was certainly intriguing, but anyone familiar with Anderson’s work might have guessed that some kind of straightforward docudrama was not in the offing. Perhaps one day there will indeed be a biopic that grapples with the convoluted and much-contested details of Hubbard’s scarcely credible career as spiritual entrepreneur—one might imagine a mode anywhere from satiric grotesque to Machiavellian analysis to impassioned polemic—but The Master is not that film, full though it is of hints in such directions.

To say that Beasts of the Southern Wild was filmed in southern Louisiana understates the case—it seems like an enormous construction made from pieces of southern Louisiana, and inhabited by the people that the film’s young director Benh Zeitlin, a New Yorker who has been living in New Orleans since 2008, found there. Yet this is no documentary but a work of purest fantasy, set in a world just adjacent to the real and operating with all the liberties of folklore.

Ever since H.P. Lovecraft, archaeology has been an indispensable point of entry to the remotest reaches of the universe. In Ridley’s Scott’s new film Prometheus, space voyagers will travel to those reaches only to find echoes of earthly mythology, whether horrendous serpents recalling the fate of Laocoön or titanic forebears proportioned on the order of Gilgamesh. At his best (as he is in much of Prometheus) Scott can really do the romantic sublime. He continually suggests more than the movie’s plot and dialogue can quite live up to, and when he wants he can deliver a boreal blast of the “magnificent desolation” that Buzz Aldrin caught sight of when landing on the Moon.

Drastically cut not long after its premiere engagement in Germany, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), one of the most influential films ever made—the font of cinematic dystopias, a source of imagery reflected in films from The Bride of Frankenstein to Blade Runner—is only now being recovered in nearly its intended form.

My immediate response to the news of Eric Rohmer’s death was the keen regret that there would be no more Rohmer films, and thus no more of those surprises he was still, at nearly 90, thoroughly capable of eliciting. Indeed, his last three films (The Lady and the Duke, Triple Agent, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) were among his most surprising, period films that ventured into political tragedy and pastoral comedy in ways that opened up new dimensions in his earlier work. Few filmmakers have been able to develop a body of utterly personal work so deliberately and methodically, and he managed it only with the most extreme budgetary discipline.

March 11, 2011

February 7, 2014,
6:30 pm

Noah Isenberg discusses his new book, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, with critic Geoffrey O’Brien. Despite the success of films like Detour (1945), Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant, overlooked filmmaker.